Some costumes turn around and make you do a double take, and this is one of them. Paige Gardner wore this original costume, dubbed Abbey, at Dragon Con last year. I wish I would have spotted the creation in person, but if I did, I probably would have blocked traffic while I took as many photos as I could and talked to her about the build. It’s simply gorgeous.

The Abbey costume was inspired by Warhammer 40K Adeptus Ministorum and features elements influenced by art nouveau. Gardner repurposes items she’s salvaged from places like thrift stores and turns them into incredible costumes. She hopes her methods encourage others who want to make costumes since she executes her outfits with limited resources. This project started with a stack of thrift store coloring books. She explains:

“…this costume evolved with my traditional tool kit of thrift store elements, no-sew shortcuts… tiny investment but lots of persistence. It’s worth noting that I actually measured some things for this project (with a real measuring tape), which I consider a significant leap forward on my “things I can do” list.”

Prince Armory is very well known online for its amazing medieval armors, especially its incredible adaptations of various characters from pop culture. From Loki to Batman, and let’s not forget about Aquaman and The Joker, all of these armors are a wonder to behold and were crafted by Geeks are Sexy friend and Prince Armory owner Samuel Lee.

From Samuel:

Conceptually this was a very challenging project. When you work on a very iconic character you have to think long and hard about how much liberty you want to take with the design. On one hand you don’t want it to play it too safe and have it a borderline carbon copy; that would be boring. And on the other you don’t want to go so far it is no longer recognizable or make design decisions that puts the fan base up in arms.

So I settled on trying to capture a number of the design elements within the classic Vader such as the banding patterns and many design lines, and then expanded into the fantasy realm with the red inlays and articulated armor designs.

The design scheme overall is of course very alternate universe. Ultimately I was going for a blend of Sci-Fi, Medieval, and Mystical Fantasy.

A new chess program takes up just 487 bytes. It appears to beat a record set on the ZX81 more than three decades ago.

BootChess can run on Windows, OS X or Linux systems. It’s a text only game, using a grid with letters to denote pieces and periods to denote empty squares. It appears to show one player’s pieces in capitals and the other’s in lower case.

Oliver Poudade told the BBC that he took on the project as a challenge to promote “sizecoding”, the idea of making code as efficient as possible.

In a detailed post about the project, Poudade explains that he was inspired by the game 1K ZX Chess, created by David Horne for the ZX81 computer in 1982. Despite the name (which actually referred to the one kilobyte of memory on the computer) that game only took up 672 bytes.

Horne once noted that the memory constraints were so great that even an ending sequence (such as a congratulatory message for the winner) would have taken it over the limit.

Both games involve a human player against the computer. While the computer decides the “best” available legal move, it does so on simple criteria and neither learns from its experiences nor adapts to the opponent’s style of play. With Horne’s game, the criteria for assessing each move were:

will it take an opponents piece;

will it move a piece out of harm’s way;

will it move a piece into harm’s way; and

will it lead to check on the opponent.

Poudade says that in principle programming a chess game is not difficult: the challenge was to do so with a small amount of code while still making it visually recognizable. He noted that pawns were the hardest to program as their allowable moves varies so much depending on the circumstances.

As with 1K ZX Chess, BootChess is missing two key components that mean it’s arguably not a “real” chess game:

castling, in which a player can switch the positions of the king and castle (also called rook); and

en passant, in which if an opponent moves a pawn two spaces on its initial advance, a player can capture the pawn as if it had only moved one space.

There are also a few rules missing, such as the option for a player to claim a draw if the game goes 50 moves without a piece being captured or a pawn moves, or if the exact same board position occurs three times.

BootChess does have one advantage over its predecessor: it allows a pawn that reaches the other side of the board to be replaced by a queen. That’s still a compromise however as real chess also allows replacement by a castle, bishop or knight.

Elevator Saga is a very creative game you can play in your web browser to learn about programming. The goal of the game is to control an elevator that moves people between floors, but you can only control the elevator by writing code to control it in JavaScript. This is a really cool way to play with and learn programming concepts like loops and conditionals. Nice job to all involved with the creation of the game!

Damien Hypolite, armed with catches from the game, traveled the Parisian bitumen to parallel fiction and reality. It turns out that some shots are perfectly integrated with the architecture of Paris. A lovely setting in abyss for an interesting photographic results.

Video games ARE art, despite what any haters of the medium will want to tell you. Games like Journey and Limbo prove this to be true, and a game like Elegy for a Dead World furthers this idea exponentially.

The best way the game could be described is sort of like those Mad-Lib games you used to play at home, where they would give you whole paragraphs and leave out certain words so you could fill them in yourself. Think that, but placed in a breathtaking, dying world (that is staggeringly rendered and surreal) and you have an idea what’s in store.

The game’s developers Ichiro Lambe and Ziba Scott wanted something uniformly different, and they created it with this amazing game that is available on Steam, right now. The coolest part? You can print out your “poem” at the end of the game, and essentially have en epic poem you wrote laying around to spark up discussion.

Let’s hope more game developers think this far outside the box in the future.

3D printing prosthetics isn’t exactly the newest thing in the world, but this take on it is surprisingly refreshing. This dog named Derby was born with disfigured legs. Running, or even walking, simply wasn’t possible. While you can see that a wheel rig was in use for some time, 3D […]

The new cross-guard lightsaber seen in the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens spurred dozens of discussions and debates among fans. Is it a practical design? That remains to be seen, but I don’t imagine it was designed only for the sake of looking cool or for toys. Regardless of how it works, the tri-blade lightsaber does have a memorable silhouette. Fans have already 3D printed the lightsaber and Makoto Tsai made a beautiful replica based on the glimpse we’ve seen so far. Look:

Time-Slices: totally addictive and delicious "Best of the Best" pickings of country-specific art, culture, technology and fashion, chosen by Random Number Generator for "Years", "Category" and "Location". We are going to gradually fill out our custom 100-year timeline with fascinating entries (in parallel with our usual features and normal content), so stay tuned and check on us often! Today's "Spin of the Exploration Wheel" gave us the following:

Here at DRB we love the exciting rhythms and unique melodic structure of Berber music of the Tuareg region. Turns out, Tunisian music is just as fascinating, if not more - as it is played on highly-ornamented, sophisticated instruments, such as custom-built "ouds", with their incredible ivory filigree over the soundhole and elaborate mother-of-pearl inlays... Plus, within the framework of Tunisian "malouf" music you actually get something not heard anywhere else.

Did you ever wish that your life be accompanied every single hour of your day with a specially-designed, unique-for-occasion music? Well, "Malouf" style provides for that, and more - read on to learn about unique Arabic "Maqamat" (music scales) and "nubas". We will start, however, with some mind-blowing "oud" designs.

Oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument used in many North Africa countries, a sort of a plucked lute (it lacks frets and has a shorter neck). Check out this incredible ornamentation on these handmade "ouds", showing the calligraphy of names of "maqamat" done in delicate ivory carvings... some instruments even include engraved poetry (poetical works by Hafiz, Rumi, and others... see "Qasida", a form of Perso-Arabic lyric poetry):

The "maqamat" scale is normally drawn in the form of a circle, with the name of the luthier usually placed in the center. This fantastic instrument has been made by Najib Shaheen (and another one dating from 1900 made by Abdo George Nahhat) - a beautiful "maqamat rose", indeed:

On the following image you can see the strips of top-quality wood (rosewood, walnut, maple and mahogany) used to make the rounded body of an "oud". By the way, the oud was originally called "Al-Oud" - "the wood" - which turned into "lute" in Europe. The earliest known oud date back to 5000 B.C. and come from Ancient Egypt; it is most certainly the ancestor of the guitar.

Infinite Music: Unique melody for every day of the year! In fact, one for every hour, every moment... including improvisation!

The rich classical music tradition of North Africa (Algeria, Libya and Tunisia) is experiencing a revival of Tunisian "Malouf" - which is a fascinating style of music that "originally spread from Islamic Spain (Andalusia) to North Africa following the Christian Reconquest of Spain and subsequent expulsion of Sephardic Jews and Muslims" in the 13 and 14th Century.

"Malouf" consists of "nubas", and "nubas" - wait for it - are something else, indeed.

"According to legend, a distinct nuba once existed for every day, holiday and other event, though only thirteen remain". Other sources mention that there were initially 24 nubat, one for each hour of the day! Each nuba lasts 1 hour, so in essence, there is music assigned to every minute...

"Nuba" pieces, in turn, are composed in a single "maqam" (specific rules of Arab musical theory and notation), and what's more -

Each "maqam" is said to evoke a different emotion in the listener

"It is sometimes said that each maqam evokes a specific emotion or set of emotions determined by the tone row and the nucleus, with different maqams sharing the same tone row but differing in nucleus and thus emotion. Maqam Rast is said to evoke pride, power, soundness of mind, and masculinity. Maqam Bayati: vitality, joy, and feminity. Sikah: love. Saba: sadness and pain. Hijaz: distant desert."

Pretty interesting album "Folkloric Music of Tunisia" came out in 1997, signaling the renewed interest in ancient music of Northern Africa, highlighting its influences from Spain, France, and even modern jazz. Speaking of jazz, one good example to listen to will be "Tunizian Jazz" by Fawzi Chekili, also issued in 1997.

French love of jazz is clearly evident on this album, but Fawzi Chekili is also famous for his "oud" playing. Another master of "oud" is Afif Taian - see his performance, which at some point sounds almost like "speed metal" guitar solo!

(on the right is a compilation of North African musical instruments)

Here are some lovely ladies playing "oud": Barbat from Tehran, Iran, and Nina - who now lives in Sweden, after spending many years in Lebanon, Egypt, Spain, Greece and Dubai:

Cosmetologist and visual artist Jan Bonito is so good at his job it's scary. Literally terrifying.
On his Instagram account he's posted a number of transformations where he becomes characters from "American Horror Story."
Yes, including Twisty the Clown.
Here are a few examples, and you can check out more of his work on his profile page.